Pippa, Rowan, and a little bit of other stuff...

Yesterday morning they took Rowan off the breathing machine, and removed her breathing tube. This was the criteria for releasing her from the IC -- unfortunately they didn't have a room for her on the pediatric ward until yesterday afternoon, but by 5:00 pm we were all moved in. It's great -- they have beds for us, a fridge, bathroom w/ shower, and we can hold her whenever we want. However, they were only giving her tylenol for pain, and as she has a combination of things wrong (tongue stitched up like Frankenstein, thrush, diaper rash, raw throat and nose from breathing and feeding tubes, etc) this was simply not cutting it. So, she had a 12 hour hysterical crying jag with a total of one hour of downtime (split into 15 minute chunks). Needless to say James and I were on the edge of our emotional and physical brink, as were she and the nurses and, we're sure, the other patients on the ward who had to listen to it. The climax came when she ripped her own feeding tube out (these things are LONG going from the nose down to the stomach) and then I had to help the nurse get it back in by holding her down because she kept trying to re-remove it. She has quite a reputation on the 5th floor as she pulled her own IV out last week -- a very difficult thing for an infant to do it turns out. Messy, too. Ahh, these are the memories we'll fondly hold onto. They finally prescribed oxycodone -- the first dose didn't work; they increased the frequency, and it didn't work; they doubled the dosage and it finally took. She's been mostly sleeping ever since and James and I got some much-needed rest. They're going to keep her drugged up for a while so she can heal from the hysteria.

So, now we're waiting for the speech/OT folks to come make sure she can swallow and then we can start her on the bottle. They'll probably not come until sometime tomorrow. After she's proven she can get enough calories into her thru bottle feeding, and the swelling in her tongue goes down, and her pain gets under control, they'll happily discharge the lot of us. I'm thinking Tuesday at the earliest, more likely Wednesday but hopefully not later! I'm currently camped out in Rowan's room, James is going back and forth between home and the hospital a couple of times a day to try and bring some normalcy to Pippa's life, and my mom (the saint) is still taking care of Pippa.

Labels: rowan